Monday, 13 July 2009

Strange leanings - Terry vs Usmanov

It seems to me that John Terry has shown his true colours this summer, it means nothing whether he leaves Chelsea or not, it is quite blatant that if he was such a loyal Chelsea man then he would have nipped these rumours of a transfer to Man City in the bud a long time ago. It was not long ago that Chelsea's club captain, the repugnant JT, signed a record breaking 135 grand a week contract. He has several years remaining on his contract, he owes Chelsea a lot in terms of loyalty, but now he can sniff more money around the corner, all this is forgotten and the king chav is clearly thinking about leaving. He could easily come out and stop all this speculation, his current silence speaks volumes. I am disgusted enough by his behaviour as an Arsenal fan, I dread to think how Chelsea fans must be feeling. Roman Abrahmovich should stick him in the reserves for the remaining years of his contract, that would learn the uneducated Judas.

This moves me onto my Usmanov rant. I have done a fair bit of research on this issue and something stands out for me, there is a definite trend for certain newspapers and media sources to be spinning the news in Usmanov's favour. A recent example of this was Steven Howard's comments in the Sun. His comments naively assume that we are certain to drop out of the top four this season and that we should embrace Usmanov's money at any cost, otherwise there will be trouble:

"Far better to take the Usmanov money now, give him a place on the board and circumvent the trouble that is surely heading towards the Emirates."

This take on events is naive at best. It does not even consider the trouble that Usmanov may bring. If Usmanov cared so much for Arsenal FC then he could just give money to the club with no strings attached, strangely a rights issue was suggested which would allow Usmanov to get his fat toes even further inside the Arsenal door. Sky's slant was also strangely biased, taking Usmanov's offer of a rights issue to equate to cash aid, spinning at best and dishonest journalism at worst in my eyes. The board quite rightly told Usmanov to stick it up his fat one, I agree with Arseblogger's take on this, in that Usmanov's comments in reaction to this are rather threatening. ACLF summarises it well too, in fact the overwhelming feeling from all Arsenal fans is that the board should do all they can to keep Usmanov as far away from the running of the club as possible.

The Sun, the NOTW, the Sunday Times, and SkySports are all owned by the same man, is this just coincidence? Whatever the reasons for this bias, we should be very skeptical of anyone naively encouraging Arsenal to embrace AlisherUsmanov, the man is more than a little shady and I for one would not trust his anorexic frame more than a micrometre. So David Dein and Mr Usmanov, Fats and Orange, or whatever you call your dodgy little business, please stop trying to swing Arsenal fans behind your selfishly motivated schemes, we want nothing to do with you and your kind.

The rights issue is total balls in it's current proposed form. It will dilute the shareholding of exisitng shareholders and would, if underwritten by uzmanov, allow him to get an even fatter foot in the door.

Annoyingly the "bias" shown in some papers hid some good points. Namely the profits made by certain board members in selling shares when they see fit, and the money not invested by the club. It is their right as shareholders to make money, but I do feel they do so at the expense of Squad investment.